Installing Sensu

Sensu Go is available for Linux, Windows (agent and CLI only), macOS (CLI only), and Docker.
If you’re trying out Sensu for the first time, we recommend setting up a local environment using the Sensu sandbox.
If you’re deploying Sensu to your infrastructure, we recommend one of our supported packages, Docker images, or configuration management integrations.
Sensu downloads are provided under the Sensu License; see the supported platforms page for more information.

Architecture overview

Powered by an an embedded transport and etcd datastore, the Sensu backend gives you flexible, automated workflows to route metrics and alerts.
Sensu backends require persistent storage for their embedded database, disk space for local asset caching, and three exposed ports:

Sensu agents are lightweight clients that run on the infrastructure components you want to monitor.
Agents register automatically with Sensu as entities and are responsible for creating check and metric events to send to the backend event pipeline.
Optionally, agents can expose ports 3031 for the agent API and 8125 for the StatsD listener.
Agents using Sensu assets require some disk space for a local cache.

Install the Sensu backend

The Sensu backend is available for Ubuntu/Debian, RHEL/CentOS, and Docker.
See the supported platforms page for more information.

2. Configure and start

You can configure Sensu using sensu-backend start flags or an /etc/sensu/backend.yml file, the former taking precedence.
At a minimum, the Sensu backend requires the state-dir flag, but here are some other useful configs and templates.

3. Open the web UI

The web UI provides a unified view of your monitoring events with user-friendly tools to reduce alert fatigue.
After starting the Sensu backend, open the web UI by visiting http://localhost:3000.
You may need to replace localhost with the
hostname or IP address where the Sensu backend is running.

Install sensuctl

Sensuctl is a command line tool for managing resources within Sensu. It works by calling Sensu’s HTTP API to create, read, update, and delete resources, events, and entities. Sensuctl is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Here the -n flag triggers non-interactive mode.
Run sensuctl config view to see your user profile.
We strongly recommend that you change the default admin password immediately using sensuctl user change-password --interactive.
For more information about using sensuctl, see the quickstart and reference docs.

Install Sensu agents

The Sensu agent is available for Ubuntu/Debian, RHEL/CentOS, Windows, and Docker.
See the supported platforms page for more information.

2. Configure and start

You can configure the Sensu agent using sensu-agent start flags or an /etc/sensu/agent.yml file, the former taking precedence.
At a minimum, the Sensu agent requires the --backend-url flag, but here are some other useful configs and templates.

# If you are running the agent locally on the same system as the Sensu backend,# add `--link sensu-backend` to your Docker arguments and change the backend# URL to `--backend-url ws://sensu-backend:8081`.# Starts an agent with the system subscriptiondocker run -v /var/lib/sensu:/var/lib/sensu -d \
--name sensu-agent sensu/sensu:latest \
sensu-agent start --backend-url ws://sensu.yourdomain.com:8081 --log-level debug --subscriptions system --api-host 0.0.0.0 --cache-dir /var/lib/sensu

3. Verify keepalive events

Sensu keepalives are the heartbeat mechanism used to ensure that all registered agents are operational and able to reach the Sensu backend.
To verify that the agent has registered with Sensu and is sending keepalive events, open the entity page in the Sensu web UI or run sensuctl entity list.

Activate licensed-tier features

Sensu Inc. offers support packages for Sensu Go as well as license-activated features designed for monitoring at scale.
To learn more about license-activated features in Sensu Go, contact the Sensu sales team.

If you already have a Sensu license, log in to your Sensu account and download your license file, then activate your license using sensuctl.

Next steps

About Sensu

The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud infrastructure, from Kubernetes to bare metal. Companies like Sony, Box.com, and Activision rely on Sensu to help deliver value faster, at scale.